Ghost stories are inspired by complicated real women
Seeing isn’t always believing.
A figure in an old gown is glimpsed at the top of the stairs, a face looms briefly from the shadows. But everyone knows there’s no such thing as ghosts.
Are there?
Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes aren’t so sure.
Janes is the founder of Boroughs of the Dead, a haunted-house tour of
New York City; Hieber is one of its guides. They also write supernatural fiction, but “A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts” is their first book together.
And it’s based on fact. Based on serious research, too. Janes and Hieber are open-minded but clear-eyed. When there’s a good story, they tell it. When it seems too good to be true, they also report that.
They’re also open to the stories behind these stories and what they say about gender, sex and society.
“Historically, women have always lived cheek by jowl with death,” Janes writes in her introduction (the authors sometimes alternate chapters, other times they collaborate). “We hover near the border of death for hours, sometimes days, during the delivery of children, and historically, we have very often died in the process.”
Yet not only are women more aware of mortality on Earth, they seem to be — at least in legend and literature — more marked for immortality once they depart it. Female ghosts dominate spooky tales around the world.
These tales’ not-sosubtle moral?
“The unleashed feminine, that awesome maelstrom of incredible sexual and physical power,” writes Janes, “is dangerous and often leads to a terrible afterlife.”
The two writers collected spectral stories from over 300 years on subjects from dowagers to slaves, killers to victims. However varied their lives were, they shared thwarted desires and, often, bloody violence.
And second, these stories, and our interpretations of what’s not easily believed, are complicated.
Both authors write about Salem, Massachusetts, the capital of America’s witch hunts and a place rich in ghostly history. Today, the town lures tourists with a playful approach, hosting a smiling statue of Samantha from TV’s “Bewitched.”
But the reality was far uglier, the authors say. These were real women targeted for their outspokenness, their property, or their unconventional lives. One supposed witch, Bridget Bishop, scandalized the town by, among other sins, wearing a red blouse.
She was hung for witchcraft, still proclaiming her innocence.
Today, her ghost is said to haunt the seafood restaurant that now stands on her land. There, reports Salem expert Sebastian Crane, patrons have noticed “inexplicable electrical difficulties, flying glasses, and silverware quietly vanishing.”
A Massachusetts crime scene of a very different sort draws other tourists to Fall River, where in 1892, Lizzie Borden took an ax and hacked up her parents. Or so goes the story and the song — “she gave her mother 40 whacks and when she saw what she had done, gave her father 41.”
However, the murder weapon was never found, and Borden was acquitted. She died a wealthy woman, and her hometown profited from her notoriety. Tourists — some true-crime fans, others ghost-hunters — still visit. The Borden house is now a bed-andbreakfast, and the staff describes a place with “mood swings,” haunted by ghostly footsteps and slamming doors.
“The strongest rooms for me are the basement and the third floor,” says a former manager. “I don’t scare easily but have been ‘unglued’ a few times when I’m alone.”
The authors are less open to the supernatural claims of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California.
Legend has it that the owner, Sarah Winchester, widow of the wealthy rifle manufacturer, feared the murdered victims of his invention. After the Civil War, she fled the couple’s Connecticut home and built an ornate California mansion designed to be so confusing that no spirit could navigate it.
Yet, Hieber points out, Winchester moved West to join her sister. She kept adding to her house because she was an enthusiastic — if entirely amateur — architect. There’s no record of her ever seeing any ghosts. She died peacefully, in bed, in her 80s.
Nine months later, her home was sold to an entrepreneur. It’s been a tourist attraction since, and ghosts are part of the attraction.
Still, Hieber isn’t willing to deny the place has a particular atmosphere. People have reported hearing strange singing or glimpsing a figure lurking in the basement. “One of the old workmen, ‘Clyde,’ appears often around the grounds in a distinct pair of overalls and Victorian boater hat,” Hieber writes.
Although Hieber and James give ghost tours, they say they stick to the facts. Others, they charge, may not be so particular.